Son of the Return of the Freezer Revenge: The Stir Fry

So then I made that Stir Fry.

I have a bottle of Chile de Arbol oil that was a byproduct of making an insanely spicy salsa (by my standards. Meaning, not very spicy at all). The oil itself can't be considered a culinary weapon, but it does add a zing to dishes that is more flavor than heat. I'll try to post a recipe of that salsa the next time I find myself making it. It's really good, actually.

This is the oil that I used to sear the stir fry beef. Set aside, add a bit more oil, saute the carrot/celery/onion blend.

Added a bag of stir fry veggies that I happened to have in The Freezer, cooked over medium-high heat for about 6 minutes, added the beef back to the pan. Gave it a couple of sprinkles of soy sauce and a good swirl of stir-fry sauce (thereby winning this entry a place in the "faking it" tag, but that sauce is pretty good!), cooked it for a minute or so longer, served over rice.

Not including prep time from earlier today (making the rice, sucker-punching vegetables, etcetera), this meal was put together in about 20 minutes. The 7 year-old ate a huge bowl of it, so I'm going to call it a success.



PS-You know what would have been awesome here and I didn't even think about? GINGER.

From the depths of my Freezer

At any given point in time I can usually dig around in my Freezer and find a bit of awesomeness.

Because I freeze EVERYTHING.

What I had in the fridge were some baby carrots, celery and onions, which by itself meant I could pretty much do anything I damn wanted.

Got some plain white rice to steam, sucker-punched my veggies in a tiny food processor, set everything aside for some stir fry I plan to whip up with some beef from... The Freezer. I usually buy a few extra packages of stir fry beef from the store, get home, wrap the entire package tight in a couple of layers of Saran wrap and forget all about them (in The Freezer) until they sound like a good idea again. They freeze well, and defrost remarkably quick.



But that's for dinner tonight. Later.
In the meantime, I could go for some soup.

Simmer some more of those chopped veggies with some chicken broth (I don't have any at the moment, so it was water and chicken bouillon), a good clove of minced garlic, some herbs (thyme, parsley, cilantro--my folks always say it's pointless to use those last two together, and I disagree), and added lime zest from The Freezer... I left that on the stove for a good 40 minutes or so, then dug around The Freezer for some more stuff.

Frozen corn.... what's this, a baggie of shredded beef? Alright... this kinda looks like an ice-cube shaped lump of blanched spinach... yeah, I think I remember doing that, okay... Sweet.

Bowl: beef, some of the cooked rice from earlier, broth. Sprinkle of lime juice. If I had avocado this would be perfection. Daughter's vs. mine: mine has the spinach and cayenne pepper. YUM.

Cheesy spinach dip

What's all THIS crap??

This is me reaching fairly randomly into the refrigerator when I realized I had a huge bag of spinach I'd forgotten about, that needed to be used Real Soon. Like, NOW. Told my sister to bring home some chips and I got to work.

WARNING: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. I DO NOT GUARANTEE RESULTS, NOR DO I PROMISE GOOD HEALTH

Tablespoon of butter, tablespoon of flour over low heat, cook a few minutes. I added about 1/4 cup of white wine, which in this case turned out to be Riesling, and even I know that's not a good idea. Riesling's too sweet, you want a dry wine, maybe a Chardonnay or a Sauvignon Blanc. It's what I had, and instead of skipping the wine altogether, I went with it. I do what I WANT.
Now, this would have been fine and dandy like so, maybe more wine, but noooooooo. I went a weird direction and added..... MILK. To an acidic wine. I believe in my heart of hearts that I knew somewhere in my subconscious that this was a Really Bad Idea, but, like I said, I do what I WANT. Can you guess what happened? Curdling happened. I almost gave up on it then, but I had faith in this little abomination I was creating and I kept simmering until it became smooth and creamy again. Believe it or not.
I added a bit more milk (probably ended up using about 3/4 of a cup total, give or take).
Then I started throwing stuff in, not all at once, but little by little. CHEESES. Shredded Monterey/Colby blend, bleu cheese crumbles, grated parmesan. Dashes of white pepper, parsley. Stir frequently, and while that's simmering and melting and coming together....

In a large pan heat some olive oil, add super finely chopped onion and garlic and saute over high heat until translucent. I added the huge amounts of spinach and covered, stirring occasionally until wilted. Drained it as best as I could and added it to my cheesy mess up there.
I simmered that for a while until it was nice and thick and cheesy and as scrumptious-looking as you can allow yourself to imagine it to be after you've seen it in its curdled stage. Removed from heat and added a couple of tablespoons of cream cheese, stirred until well incorporated, and voila.


It turned out to be delicious and everybody present loved the hell out of it and now it's completely gone, but that's not the point.

I still don't recommend trying this out for yourself.

(Aside from eating it with chips, I poured some over rice and it was awesome. Maybe making it thicker and baking it inside croissants would be fantastic. I could also see it over seared salmon. But seriously, don't make this at home)

Rice balls and cupcakes

I love onigiri. In the simplest of forms it is easy to make, minimum involvement required, yummy, and cheeeeeeeap.

My pantry is in a sorry state at the moment, but I always have something like 5 varieties of rice on hand and my last can of tuna was some roasted-garlic thing I bought a few weeks ago on a whim.

Plain, steamed white rice, a little bit of mayo in the tuna and nothing more (the Daughter is picky about tuna)... I didn't even use any seaweed today, although I did put Tabasco sauce and pickled ginger in mine.

And because I honestly just don't feel like doing anything complicated today, I finally used that box of Cherry Chip cake mix that's been in my pantry forever, to make it into mini cupcakes. I have some buttercream icing in my fridge from the last time I had to make some (same recipe as here), I'm probably going to put some malt powder and food coloring in it and call it a day.



UPDATE - Throw in a frozen blueberry on top of that icing, baby. Oh, yeah.

Chicken and Rice v2.0

Yeah, I got nothing on Kroger's baked chicken.

I made a different version of that other chicken and rice, in which I actually purchased uncooked chicken and marinated it and did my experimenting around with it for a while.

Let's see, what's in here... some red onion, parsley, ginger, garlic, lemon zest... added after the picture was taken - balsamic vinagrette, honey, lime juice, mustard, thyme, ponzu sauce... I don't know, I just raided my fridge and made it up as I went.

I left that in the fridge for a few hours, baked it, cubed it, decided I had used perhaps Way Too Much Onion and ended up making a very plain cream sauce (as opposed to the onion cream sauce in the post linked above). It was good, I guess. I mean, I'm glad I liked it, because I ended up making obscene amounts of it and have pretty much been eating nothing but for the last 4 days, but I'll take crispy, roasted chicken skin over skinless any day.

Reason/excuse = I actually made this for the pot luck at work and I wanted something that could easily and quickly be ladled onto a plate with minimum fuss. Thus the lack of bone and skin.

Chicken and rice

I have a thing for roasted chicken, and it borders on "unhealthy obsession."
Roasted chicken is pretty much perfect. A whole chicken costs barely more than a sub, and you can get something like 3-4 meals out of it (more like 2 meals for me, because, seriously, I LOVE roasted chicken).
We went to Kroger tonight and they had this huge 16-piece chicken thing for 8 bucks. Add to this the recent acquisition of a toaster oven, and dinner was on its way.
Chicken was baked for about 23 minutes at 325F (so the package instructed), and while that was happening I made some white rice with frozen corn thrown in. Since both of these things sort of cook themselves, I busied myself with making an onion cream sauce.

There are things I keep in my freezer to make lazy meals even easier than they already are. For example, I love parsley with a passion, but I never use an entire bunch before it starts going bad. So I dry it up as much as possible using paper towels, then finely chop it, blot out more moisture, and then store it in an airtight container in the freezer. When I need some, I bang the container on the counter a few times, shake it up, and it goes straight into whatever I'm cooking. Better than dried parsley.
(I also do this with cilantro)

Another thing I keep in the freezer is cubes of chicken or beef broth. The chicken ones are usually a result of a roasted chicken binge, when I take all the meat off the bones for the 2 picky eaters in the household, throw the bones in a pot with whatever peels/stems/leaves I have leftover when cleaning up vegetables for storage, and simmer over low heat for about an hour. The beef ones happen as a side effect of shredded meat for flautas or salpicon (which I'll probably post about eventually, but tonight is not the night).
I have 2 ice trays specifically for the purpose of freezing broth.

So, this onion cream sauce.
(I may or may not also have a thing for cream of-'s)
Roux drill - melt about a tablespoon of butter over low heat, add equal amount of flour and whisk until it dissolves, allow to cook for a bit until thick.
Then I started playing with it--added some milk... a few beef broth ice cubes, about half an envelope of onion soup/dip mix, some parsley from the freezer, some thyme (chicken + thyme = OTP). I just messed with it until it was the consistency and amount that I wanted.


I wish the end result had looked as pretty as it was tasty. For a half-assed meal thrown together out of things in my pantry/freezer and an impulse buy at Kroger, it was much better than it had any right to be.